Wikipedia talk:Fancruft

Fair enough, but can you show me one place where the term fancruft is used in a non-pejorative sense? --Phil | Talk 12:40, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

I've had a go at making this a little more even-handed. It surprised me to find that it was a Wikipedia neologism, but that's the Google indication anyway. Andrewa 10:30, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

How about, uh, every time I use it? What you're asking for me is the impossible task of proving a negative, proving that I do not have any intent to insult when I use the term. Just because pejorative meaning can be read into the term does not mean that you can assume bad faith and accuse everyone who uses it of having pejorative intent. -- Antaeus Feldspar 05:47, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

My simple advice is: If you can explain your vote without using such terms, do, and if you can't, don't vote. Just a suggestion. There are lots of other jobs to do. Andrewa 19:56, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

My suggestion is that you stop assigning yourself the privilege of determining which terms can be used and which can't or who should stop voting because they don't do it your way. -- Antaeus Feldspar 00:23, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

As I said, it was just a suggestion. No such privileges are assigned or claimed. I guess in hindsight there wasn't a lot of hope that the advice would be helpful to you, but as it's a public forum, I'm still hopeful it may help others. Peace! Andrewa 01:04, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

What is fancruft, and is it bad for us?

Has anybody ever tried to squeeze out any objective answer to these questions, no matter how incomplete? No, really. I'm interested. Forget about consensus for a moment—let's not try to get "policy" passed for now. I'd just like a philosophical discussion on one aspect of what Wikipedia is not, beyond people just shouting links to each other.

Why are people so strongly opposed to fancruft? What do we consider to be fancruft in the first place? (For the moment, I hope we can postpone the PC discussions on whether "fancruft" is a pejorative term or not—if you don't like it, read "expertism" instead, or something.) What unconvential aspects of Wikipedia, compared to traditional encyclopedias, play a role in its inclusion or exclusion?

Before proceeding, check egos and actual fan dedications at the door, please. No grudge matches and no proposed policy discussions in this section. Humor me. JRM 01:08, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)

More to the point, why does it matter? Wikipedia already has plenty of relevant policy (and precident) regarding what should and shouldn't be included, without having to resort to the definition of fancruft. Use of the word fancruft just gets noses out of joint. Shane King 06:50, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

I don't dispute that, but if people are using this single word to apply a specific instance of that policy, I want to know why they're doing it and what it means. There's no use in pretending this value judgement doesn't or shouldn't exist, that people are fundamentally wrong in using it, and that we should all stick to established policy and precedent anyway (the latter is of course quite contentious, since we make policy and precedent ourselves).

I'm actually glad people are using it. Otherwise it just all boils down to "notability" again, and that's even more vague and ill-specified than "fancruft". At least with that, people are implying a more-or-less specific reason why they don't consider it notable. JRM 09:01, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)

There are plenty of reasons people could be giving when they vote delete on what they describe as "funcruft" that aren't "non-notable". There are dozens of inclusion criteria that don't boil down to notability. That's my complaint: by calling it fancruft they're just avoiding their obligation as described at the top of the vfd page of explaining their reasoning. Fancruft isn't a valid reason, since it's not listed anywhere as being a valid reason. I'm opposing any move to make it policy that it should become a reason, because it's an ill-defined word that is completely unneccesary. If we want to fix the "people vote fancruft and we don't know what it means" problem, we really should do it by discarding all votes that don't list a reason for keep/delete that can be referenced to policy. I'm not holding my breath though, most people seem to not care about policy and instead only care about their own deletionist or inclusionist ideas. Shane King 03:19, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

Good questions. I'll just deal with the two in the title for now, I think the question of why are people so strongly... is also a key, but I'd like to do some groundwork first.

As to what is fancruft, I think in one way it depends on the user, like any term. At the risk of retreating into philocruft, the precise definition of terms is an Aristotelian concept. Aristotle didn't formalise this in any way, he rather assumed it could be done; Prescriptive linguistics and naive set theory both followed this lead, and both were finally abandoned following the work of Wittgenstein, Austin and Kripke in the mid 20th century. But just as the consequences of this to Mathematics, which started with Russell's demolition of Frege at the start of the 20th century, still haven't made it into the classroom (and may never do so), so the consequences for linguistics (and semantics in particular) haven't hit the public mind. Most people still think that defining a term in a prescriptive or legalistic way is a useful thing to do.

As a final shot here, I think it's fascinating that the venerable OED was originally descriptive not prescriptive. This is perhaps especially relevant to we encyclopedists?

Lewis Carroll was 'way ahead of us when he has Humpty Dumpty say When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. Communication is both imperfect and cooperative. So the question is, what do the users of this word intend it to mean, and is there any consensus among them?

That makes your second question, is it bad for us, hard to answer. I would have to say sometimes.

Wikipedia succeeds whenever someone finds the information they want, and fails whenever they look and don't find it. Whether the experience is positive in other ways, such as great-looking pages, is important too but secondary. The primary goal is to deliver the information.

For this to happen, the information needs to be there (and of course accurate) and they need to find it. It's the second problem that can make detail excessive, by making the desired information harder to find.

I think that's enough from me for a start. I hope this helps. Andrewa 18:50, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't see a clear line...

I don't see a clear line between literary criticism, and "fan cruft", except for the "I know it when I see it" theory.

For example, I think that no one would object to an article discussing Romeo and Juliet (The well known play by Shakespeare). If I was contributing to that article (which I have no plans to do) I certainly might include some background on the Capulet and Montague familes.

Why for some of us is that somehow more appropriate than an article about the various characters in Dragon Ball Z?

(To answer my own retorical question) because Shakespeare has somehow entered our Cultural literacy (in E.D. Hirsch's usage). This is clearly a subjective question. Notice also that I said "our" two sentences ago. We don't all come from the same culture. Maybe for some of us (in Japan perhaps) Akira Toriyama is much more well known (and a part of the Cultural literacy than William Shakespeare.

Maybe for some of us things like a 'Get out of jail free card' and 'Do not collect two hundred dollars' have entered the culture. For others, Yu-Gi-Oh! cards are more a part of the culture.

I also fail to see the negative consequences of leaving the fancruft in the wikipedia. I don't think that it reflects poorly on the other articles. Morris 03:22, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

Your observations are keen, and especially valuable in regards to the (supposed?) culture-neutral angle our encyclopedia adopts. (Itself of course subject to massive discussion, i.e. there's a de facto cultural bias anyway in our readers, so why not our writers...)

However, if we consider Wikipedias in other cultures, I think this can't be the whole picture. Shakespeare is notable in all Wikipedias because he was notable in English literature, and English literature is itself a notable topic (of course, more directly, Shakespeare has been massively translated and has entered new cultures that way). Can we say the same for (still random example) Dragonball Z?

Perhaps we can claim that has entered into cultural literacy if we consider a specific subculture, but of course that means anything goes, anything at all for which fans are sufficiently tight-knit to form a subculture. And in these days of massive online communication, fans meet up excessively easy.

So, is it really that "fancruft" is just what you call things you're not interested in, and you should basically reformulate it into other terms (like "notability", another shibboleth)? Of course "notability" can be made "objective" more easily: just start counting interested people... JRM 09:22, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)

I agree entirely. There is a discussion on VfD currently in which nearly all the participants ridicule a comparison of Portia with Pokemon characters. But they are looking at it from a narrow perspective, I think. I'd venture to suggest that far, far more people interest themselves in Yu-Gi-Oh cards or the Simpsons than in Tale of the Tub, which it would be fair to say is probably not even particularly widely read. There's a large element in yelling "fancruft" of "I'm not interested". But hey, we have articles on fairly minor areas of mathematics and science, which are not particularly expandable (or interesting to anyone but mathematicians or scientists), and yet if you tried to list them, with the reason "mathcruft", you'd get your arse kicked. "Notability" is all too often a codeword for "I don't know what it is", when it isn't just a way of saying "I have no reason as such for not wanting this in, it just doesn't fit my idea of what should be in an encyclopaedia". The latter would at least be honest!Dr Zen 05:17, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

My problems with fancruft

I see two problems going on in the Wikipedia where fancruft is just the most obvious example. First is the atomization of topics down to articles on topics that only the most rabid fan or aficionado cares about. Often this stuff is done better elsewhere on the internet (witness the multiple Startrek projects).

The other side of this atomization is that I've often seen where the smaller articles have information that should have been left in the larger article (which when removed means that there is not much reason to keep the smaller article).

Why is this a problem? Part of it is the reputation of the Wikipedia. Do we want to be known, for example, as a place where high school students can find accurate and comprehensive articles on topics that will help them complete their schoolwork. Or do we want to be known as the place to find long articles on characters from Frank Herbert's Dune novel, as well as on video game characters?

Another problem is that too many editors for the Wikipedia seem to lose sight of the fact that the Wikipedia is ultimately for the casual user and we should do everything to make it easy for them. For example, if you go to The Tale of Genji#The tale article you can see a link for the main character Genji. If you go to that article, however, most people will probably have the same reaction that I had when I found that all there was in the article was a repeat of some of the info in the main article and a little bit of trivia. My reaction was "That was a complete waste of time". Even though the Tale of the Genji article is pretty good, the last impression, and the one that many people may keep on the Wikipedia may be the "waste of time" impression. There is absolutely no reason to have a separate Hikaru no Genji because everything important about him should be in the main The Tale of Genji article.

What I personally think needs to be done is that another sister project to the Wikipedia be developed--a "Wikipedia of the Imagination" (Wikimaginarium perhaps?), and then fans can go crazy entering anything and everything that they want down to the minutest bit of triva. For the main Wikipedia, however, the criteria for entering articles about characters should be: Does the character have significance outside of the source that it came from. Using that criteria, there really are very few characters that will qualify. Examples would include Sherlock Holmes as the über-example, plus others such as Holden Caulfield, Ishmael, Cinderella, Don Quixote, Fagin, Faust, Robin Hood, Tarzan, and Uncle Tom. [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 10:45, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You make good points, and some disputable ones—I'll just touch on the obvious stuff for now, because I'm talking too much here anyway. (I pwnz0r this page! :-)

I think the reputation argument is indeed important in the eyes of many people (I'm not saying I agree, but that isn't the point of this discussion anyway). Just one quick quote: Do we want to be known, for example, as a place where high school students can find accurate and comprehensive articles on topics that will help them complete their schoolwork. Or do we want to be known as the place to find long articles on characters from Frank Herbert's Dune novel, as well as on video game characters? Have we already established that we can't possibly be known as both and get away with it?

What do you mean with the Wikipedia is ultimately for the casual user and we should do everything to make it easy for them? You're not talking about the lowest common denominator here, right? ("Hey, the casual user doesn't need to know about Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and who the hell cares about Praise-God Barebone anyway?") Can you clarify a bit? Are you just talking about the fragmentation of articles and the level of detail?

Re Wikimaginarium: not enough time to give this idea the full thought it needs. I'll leave the room to other speakers for now. JRM 11:04, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)

re: Do both: If someone was to attempt to judge the Wikipedia by the quality and subject matter of the articles that they find by hitting the Randompage link, their verdict might be that the Wikipedia is for unexpanded gazateer entries and fancruft. It would be difficult to measure, but my sense on the matter is the fancruft entries are expanding faster (much faster?) than the Wikipedia as a whole. Thus it is quite easy to find articles like: Cyäegha, Sol Rosenberg, Hasimir Fenring, Cyan Garamonde, and Nately's Whore's Kid Sister. In my opinion, none of these particular articles deserve an encyclopedia entry, and if mentioned at all, should be in an annotated "List of ..." article.

re: "casual user": that was a bad choice of words. What I meant was anyone who was not a regular or even casual Wikipedia editor. I certainly didn't mean any reference to a "lowest common denominator" for users. It was meant to refer to anyone who might want to turn to the Wikipedia and who expects it to be a reliable, comprehensive, unbiased source of encyclopedic information that might help with school homework, solve bar bets, provide information on interesting or unusual subjects, etc.--that is, all the sorts of uses that the Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta are also used for. [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 12:35, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have the honor and pleasure of being a father of fifth grade and ninth grade students. I have introduced them to wikipedia, and they have sometimes found it useful for their research. (The biggest problem, compared to paper reference works is the need to have an exact spelling of something, but I discuss that elsewhere.) I think that they may be what GK meant by 'casual user'. They are not at all bothered by 100,000 articles that they are not going to read. The division of an article into many small articles is not really a big problem.

I would consider the The Tale of Genji#The tale (as described above) as just an article that should be improved by an editor. That could apply to any field of knowlege. I would guess that a poorly written section is more likely in an area with few editors.

In the case of my kids, the systemic bias is likely to work in their favor, as they are interested in (mostly) relatively well studies aspects of American and Western European history.

If the problem is with perceptions of wikipedia, maybe we should get rid of teh random page button. Or maybe give each page a weight based on something like the number of distinct people who have edited the page, or looked at the page. Morris 15:02, Dec 6, 2004 (UTC)

I think gK was just referring to one way of judging Wikipedia's quality: random probes, with "random" meaning equal distribution. Arguably, it's not a very meaningful way (nobody browses Wikipedia like this to get information, except perhaps trivia nuts), but the point can be made without the random page link (or suggestions for fixing it—that's yet another good discussion, but separate). That said, the objection that fancruft might make the encyclopedia appear to be of poor quality to people who judge it by the statistical distribution of topical article counts (can you still parse this? :-) seems to cry out for new ways of measuring Wikipedia, not weedling "overrepresented" articles down or removing them outright to make the statistics nicer. Random probes might be a good judge of (say) Britannica, but that's because it's a paper encyclopedia. The Britannica editors simply couldn't afford articles like Characteristics of common wasps and bees (impossible to look up) or Lost Springs, Wyoming (precedent to include every named place on earth, which makes all the rest impossible to look up), whether potentially useful to readers or not. Wikipedia has no such problems, by virtue of its medium; Wiki is not paper. That's not meant as an end to the discussion (for once :-), just to point out that the article distribution will always be anomalous compared to traditional encyclopedia, and that that's not in itself a good reason for change. JRM 17:19, 2004 Dec 6 (UTC)

I think that part of the problem with "fancruft" is that a potential new user, or someone evaluating wikipedia might very well decide to push the random-page button. I tried it a few times. I get mostly articles about more-or-less ordinary small cities in various parts of the world (primarily the central part of the US), with a few articles about minor characters in sci-fi or fantasy television shows. I'm just suggesting that we shouldn't do anything to go out of our way to point out the article distribution. Morris 05:08, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

Here's an easy solution: remove the random page link. Since every debate on this topic seems to inevitably boil down to "someone might hit the random page button and find wikipedia to be crap", removing the random page link would seem to solve it once and for all. At the very least, it would make us focus on the real issues. Shane King 03:24, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

That (removing the random page link) was my suggestion a few paragraphs above. I have yet to read any other coherent reason for disallowing stuff.

The fact that wikipedia has a lot of information about one sci-fi tv series does not set a precedent that it is inadequate if it does not cover every other series to the same level. (The same argument applies to high schools, small towns, and pretty much anything else for that matter). Getting to the systemic bias issue, we have a lot more material on Star Trek than we do on William Shakespeare. What does that prove? That the editors are more interested in some things than in others. Wikipedia may become known as the place to find information about certain areas of popular culture. I don't know if that is what the founders had in mind, but it is okay. As I tried to say above, my pop-culture, might very well be your classic. Morris 04:22, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

Oops, missed it in my rush to be sardonic. ;)

Anyway, I think the whole systemic bias issue is overplayed. The fact that there are so many articles on Star Trek compared to Shakespeare to me says our editors are more interrested in Star Trek. Our editors are drawn from our readers. By extrapolation, our readers are also likely to be more interested in Star Trek. I agree with you on the idea that we should embrace this. To do otherwise reeks of intellectual snobbery to me. Shane King 04:36, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

We are in agreement. Morris 05:20, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

Neutrality

I think the issue at stake here is whether we are neutral in the value we ascribe to different things. As long as the article complies with the other policies, I think it's fine to have articles on Japanese card games. I really don't think that the issue of respectability is one we should worry about. When we unpack that concept what we find is that we are worried that users will think less of us if we don't agree with them about what is important or interesting. Let the user beware if they press the random page link - they may get great literature, or they may get star trek trivia, or perhaps a small american town the no-one has ever heard of. If they didn't want to take that chance, they shouldn't have pressed 'random page'! Intrigue 03:10, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A random sample of randompages

Here are twenty consecutive pages obtained using the randompage link, starting from the first that I received.

Ashley (Power Rangers) - typical fancruft, does not explicitly mention that this is about fiction
Thomas Kirk - biographical stub
Thomas M. Reynolds - biographical stub
Seven Persons, Alberta - geographical microstub
Lesseps class land battleship - typical fancruft, does not explicitly mention that this is about fiction
Davis-Monthan Air Force Base - quite nice article of a more or less geographical nature
List of anime - meta-fancruft
Abdullah (Afghanistan) - biographical stub
Velocipede - stub
Edward MacDowell - biographical article
Maxi Mounds - biographical stub about a porn model noted "for her extraordinarily large breasts"
Northern cities vowel shift - stub about a linguistic topic
Second dealing - poker-related stub (fancruft?) Intrigue
Mountains of the Moon - short geographical article
Bridge of Sighs (Oxford) - geographical stub
LVMH - article about a major international company
William Broomfield - short biographical article
Sound logo - stub
Maternity - dictionary definition
West Midland Bird Club - article about an ornithological society

Thus, we have:

three fancruft articles, two of which do not even mention that they are about fiction
one dictionary definition
six biographies, including one porn star noted for extraordinarily large breasts (though not about fiction, this one seems to fit in the category of "small, specialised audience", therefore it is more like fancruft than like a valid article)
four geographical articles/stubs
six other articles

If I were a casual reader, this selection would not leave a favorable impression. This is just not what I expect in an encyclopedia. Kosebamse 11:38, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

What's the argument here? That the random link should go? That what you consider fancruft should go? That stubs should go? That Wikipedia contributors should hold themselves to higher standards in general? I'll give you the last one and I'm getting more convinced that the random link is a completely bogus way of evaluating Wikipedia (we have more rubbish than quality, now there's a surprise for a mass-edited online encyclopedia), but I don't quite see what the relevance is in this discussion. Are you advocating that we should delete everything that looks bad because it will make the remaining good stuff look better? Are you arguing that the bad articles are beyond saving anyway? Are you getting tired of me second-guessing your motives yet? :-) JRM 12:08, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

I did this out of curiosity and don't make a specific argument here. However, unscientific as it is, the list gives an impression of the amount of 1) low-quality work (which doesn't bother me at all, that's how many articles start); 2) manifestly unencyclopedic articles even by our standards - Wikipedia is not a dictionary; 3) uninteresting trivia (while erotic actor is an interesting article, articles about individual porn stars are usually not, and we have far too many such articles); 4) fancruft. I have long stopped worrying about the ever increasing amount of ever more idiotic trivia in Wikipedia; but a casual reader looking at a random page will probably not like it. We tend to forget that we are making an encyclopedia for ordinary people (as opposed to slashdotters). It may be a good idea to remove the randompage function, because more often than not, a random article just makes us look silly. Kosebamse 12:43, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Let's remove the "Random page" function

As Kosebamse suggests above, I think that the Random page button should be removed. My unscientific experiment gets comparable results to his report above.

If that happens, then (for the most part) only people looking for fancruft articles will find them, and presumably they won't mind.

If I am evaluating or reviewing an encyclopedia (paper or electronic) I might try opening it to a random spot, and reading to evaluate the quality of the writing, but more likely I will look up topics where I think I have some specific expertise, and evaluate a few articles. Wikipedia looks good based on the second test, and if someone finds it lacking on their topic, well, that is at least a fair evaluation. Morris 14:39, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, y'all. I ask for no ~~policy discussions~~ and what do I get?! Damn wiki concept. :-) Seriously, though, if this is going to be discussed in earnest, this is not the page to do it. I expect opposition along the lines of "just because Wikipedia looks crap doesn't mean we should hide it" and "keep it, it lets me find all the fancruft and put it on VfD" and "the random page link is my life, or what most resembles it in any case", most of which is utterly tangential to this discussion. Take it to ~~Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)~~, please. Start a new page if you have to. JRM 14:49, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

Your point is well taken.Morris 15:40, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

It's nevertheless silly and impolite. I should have referred you to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), of course. I also sound like a boor when I Command people to Start New Pages. Apologies for that. JRM 16:11, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

What about a tag that stops a page being shown on random? Or maybe altering random pages so that by default it does not show stubs? Although, on the other hand, I think many people use rand to find and fix stubs. Intrigue 18:36, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

OK, pretend I'm starting a new page. Hmm hmm, hmm hmm... Done. So the rest of my comment is on this new page, if you will.

The tag idea has been discussed, and if I remembered where, I'd point us to the discussion. Darnit!

Using rand to find and fix stubs is pretty silly. There's a reason we have Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub. Don't tell me you've tried all the links on there and found nothing to fix. I can see how lazy or opportunistic people would just hit rand enough times to get there, but that's still silly. More importantly, that has nothing to do with the idea discussed above that rand is harmful to our public image... Oh wait, there is no above, as I've put this on a new page. Never mind... :-) JRM 18:57, 2004 Dec 8 (UTC)

I would suggest not to remove the randompage function, but hide it from non-logged-in users. That way the causal reader will be spared the hideous truth, yet users who like to use it still can. How about that? And the tag thing can be handled separately, I guess it would mean much more work. Kosebamse 11:39, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I strongly support keeping the randompage function. I often encourage people to use it to get a flavor of what is here. And if you think it is more likely to turn up crap than a worthwhile article, then work to make Wikipedia better! -- Jmabel | Talk 20:34, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

We should keep the random page function for all. Maurreen 19:27, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I agree with Jmabel and Maurreen. The random page function is one of Wikipedia's best points. Yes, you turn up crap. But then you can edit it! Wicked! Dr Zen 05:22, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Minutiae and details

In my opinion, it is appropriate that parts of popular culture - long-running TV series etc - have articles. However, it is the minutiae - secondary and tertiary characters, background details, specific jokes - that can get tiresome. And that is not limited to popular books or movies - Minor characters in Atlas Shrugged used to be group of short articles devoted to each character.

Star Trek Encyclopedia I have read may have set a precedent for that amount of detail - if something was mentioned in a dialogue, it was included. Likewise embryonic B5 dictionary I have seen.

So, we could come into agreement into the extent of detail that is appropriate to general encyclopedia and what actually need their own articles. Of course, to devoted followers of a TV or comic book or book series everything - up to and including fanfic - may be important but it may not be appropriate here. Skysmith 11:42, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I think this level of detail is fine as long as it is verifiable. Why not? WP is not paper, and it is of interest to some. Other resources like star trek encyclopedia are not free, so there is a case for duplicating info here. Intrigue 20:52, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I also have no problem with Star Trek minutiae (or other fictional works). I looked at some editors user pages. A lot of people think that pages about their favorite TV shows are very important. I also see no harm (Wikipedia is not paper). Caveats:

Every single article should clearly distinguish fiction from reality. I would not want to look up something like "shuttle" and find a description of a fictional device with no clear indication that I was reading about a fictional universe.
I still suggesting getting rid of "Random page" to avoid reviewers getting the impression that all wikipedia has is sci fi minutiae. Morris 21:06, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

It would be great to have a tag to apply to this kind of stuff so that it would not show up on random. Intrigue 22:15, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

That idea, I think, is mentioned so often that it merits a counterargument.

For one thing, there is the huge, POV and ungrateful task of having to decide what is and is not suitable for a random link. Then there's the inherent irony in the idea of censoring things from an unbiased selection of random articles. Any bias there is, is just the bias present in Wikipedia. We may claim that bias needs to be shifted through a link, for the benefit of our readers, but hold your horses for a moment—who are we kidding? Who am I to decide that Hackensack, New Jersey should not appear to a reader who selects a random article? What if I'm a Hackensack resident delighted to see it featured in Wikipedia? OK, so maybe we can afford not to delight all the Hackensack residents, but still—if we're talking about public image, then how about the big discussion on the "dirty" talk page that was recently featured on Talk:Main page? Users could get to anal sex through a random link—why risk exposing them to a possibly offensive article and harming our image, and simply slip in the tag that hides it from the random page function? No harm, no fuss, right?

This is, of course, a tendentious and logically unsubstantiated slippery slope argument, but the crux remains: exactly what do we consider suitable "random" articles?

If there's any proposal on the random page (and because I'm an annoying jerk, I'm just going to mention Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) again), I'd make it this: make the "random page" link visible only to registered contributors. This is most likely to be successful. I'm still not saying people aren't going to violently oppose this, on grounds of "dishonesty" and the possible reflection the removal could have on our image ("Wikipedia doesn't want you to know it's a fancruft barn!"), but it might have a chance. Oh, and have I mentioned that one page for proposals yet? What's it called again? Ouch! OK, I'll shut up about it... JRM 23:18, 2004 Dec 9 (UTC)

Thoughts

The fact that Wikipedia is the world's most comprehensive source of information on pop culture, even containing articles on minor characters from video games, is something we should be utterly proud of. Removing the random page link to hide this amazing richness from visitors makes no sense whatsoever.

What we should not be proud of, however, is the quality of many such articles; a large portion of the content in Wikipedia is extremely poorly written and organized. But removing the random page link to hide these articles would be an immensely bad idea too. Wikipedia is a wiki, and its success stems from the fact that visitors are able to edit articles. If the random, obscure articles become harder to find, they will be less likely to improve. There's no point in pretending that Wikipedia is a finished work.

-- Fredrik | talk 14:36, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. The random page link does not make it easier to find anything. I am pretty sure that even the most popular fictional universe (Star Trek? Tolkien?) does not take up even one percent of the article space. I actually agree that our wealth of information on those topic is to wikipedia's credit. However the random page link does not effectively show this richness to visitors. If you actually want to find an article about Klingons or Mordor, I suggest that removing the random page link will not make it any harder. Morris 15:35, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. We want to be taken seriously. Slashdotters and videogamers already know us well, but our aims are beyond them. We want to create a universal encyclopedia that appeals to a not-specialised audience, and I just can't see how we could favorably impress a random reader with the sort of hyper-specialised, comprehensible-to-hardcore-fan-only, trivial details that the randompage function often produces. Kosebamse 11:01, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't see how being a universal encyclopedia and omitting specialized information go together. Should we omit hyper-specialised, comprehensible-to-hardcore-fan-only details on, say, complex analysis? Is the distinguishing factor whether information is "trivial"? If so, I would like an elaboration on what constitutes triviality. Is information trivial when it is not interesting? I personally don't think 16th century Slovak poetry is the slightest bit interesting. Now, if you want more people to be impressed by our coverage of 16th century Slovak poetry, the solution is to go and write a few great articles about it (your help would be appreciated for Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias) instead of hiding other, valid content. Although I find anything that might be said about the subject trivial, I promise I won't say the result should be hidden from visitors by the time our coverage of 16th century Slovak poetry dwarfs our coverage of Nintendo characters ;) -- Fredrik | talk 11:28, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I am not talking about omitting information, but about presenting ourselves favorably to the general public. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any empirical studies about how Wikipedia is perceived by outsiders, so I have to rely on my conjectures. It is my impression that our content is strongly slanted towards pop culture with all its associated fancruftery, while other topics - let's say medicine, classical music, literature (non-Tolkien or sci-fi, that is), developing countries, etc. etc. - are sadly underdeveloped. If I were a casual visitor trying to find what all this is about, the randompage function would quite possibly make me believe that Wikipedia is in large parts a repository of obscure pop culture trivia, and that is not the impression that we want to leave with first-time visitors. Kosebamse 12:30, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I interviewed a few users (not editors or contributors) ...

I spoke to a few high school students who sometimes use wikipedia to do their research. Almost exclusively, they are interested in history of the United States, Western Europe, or adjacent portions of Asia. Some people had tried the random page button, but had no particular impression of the random pages that they got. When specifically asked what wikipedia is good for, the answer was always: history. When I specifically mentioned that wikipedia had more information on Middle Earth than on most countries in Eastern Europe, the response was some variation of "so what" or "who cares". One person pointed out that they might study Tolkien in English class in some future year.

My points (in response to various points above):

An person using wikipedia as an encyclopedia, to find information is only going to know about the fancruft if he/she specifically looks for it, and wants to find it. (If someone starts looking up Tolkien and following the links, they can quickly find a lot of information. If they are looking for information about Russia in the time of Peter the Great, they are never going to even know that the fancruft is there.
There is no harm being done by that fancruft. It does not give a bad impression of wikipedia, because only the guys who look at the special pages (recent changes, deletion, etc.) or the people who specifically want to read it even know that it's there.
One exception are someone accidently coming across something, so I think that every (appropriate) article should be required to say "fictional universe" or something similar in the first sentence or two. The only other exception I can think of is the random page button. I suggested (above) either getting rid of it, or as an alternative weighing articles in some way, such as the number of editors who have contributed to the article or something like that. Morris 15:45, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

My conclusions from all this

Preliminary, as always, since this is a wiki. But reading all of the above, having been around VfD for a while, and having had some hands-on experience, I've reached the following conclusions:

There is less subjectivity involved in determining what "fancruft" is than most people opposed to the term itself want to believe. Fancruft is generally restricted to contemporary fictional subjects that admit few nontrivial facts. In theory, non-fiction, ancient fiction or structurally detailed fiction could be labeled fancruft, but in practice this doesn't happen. Nobody is likely to label the Stark-Heegner theorem, The Quatrain of Seven Steps, or Dream (Sandman) as nothing but fancruft on the grounds that these are too detailed and specialized to be of general interest or usefulness. People may not see why we need articles on them, but they will not argue that the existing ones should be deleted.
Even if the term is objective enough, there is no conclusive evidence that fancruft is bad for Wikipedia. Some people might feel that it is, but this is a personal opinion, not something they can back up with facts. Nobody has ever written out unambiguous standards for quality and argued that they are appropriate, but fancruft violates them. Nobody has ever demonstrated that more contributors leave Wikipedia over seeing the fancruft than there are contributors who think fancruft is harmless or even potentially beneficial. The "people will be upset after using the random link a few times" is a favorite straw man argument that has never left the realm of hypothesis, and is better dealt with by discussions on the feature itself.
As such, merely judging something to be "fancruft" is a poor reason in and of itself for arguing deletion. The current policy de facto allows any personal opinion to serve as a vote, but this makes it no less of an opinion, with no established grounds for convincing people deletion would be best for Wikipedia. And without the possibility of convincing people, consensus is only reachable in a group that happens to think the same way, for whatever reason. But we wouldn't be having this discussion if we all thought the same way about it.
The decision to delete is more motivated by the quality of an article at the time of deletion than by its topic. A bad article on a minor fictional character will be deleted because many do not want badly-written articles to be in Wikipedia if they can help it, and they assume there will never be enough motivated people (least of all themselves) to fix the problems. A bad article on a major topic will be rewritten. A bad article on a minor topic often is not, alas. Many people do not want to hear that the article might improve eventually. They want a solid guarantee that it will, or else they want it to look good now. Articles on fictional subjects and especially minor fictional subjects are commonly held to higher standards, whether we agree with this or not. In short: this is actually the question of what degree of eventualism we should apply.
It is counterproductive to argue with people that they cannot exclude things merely because they're fancruft. You cannot effectively challenge someone's personal opinion by calling it wrong. The productive way to proceed is to write the article to our standards. In particular, an article on a fictional subject must always mention that the subject is fictional, it must establish the context in which the subject exists, and it must establish why it warrants a separate article rather than being part of a larger existing article. Articles are not sacrosanct. If the information is not yet extensive enough to have its own article, the correct thing to do is merge and redirect.
Just as deletionists hunt for articles to delete, inclusionist should hunt for articles deletionists are likely to abhor. If you find such an article, follow the guidelines in the previous step. Actively try to find a good place for the information if a separate article is not warranted before it would get deleted. Merging is no longer an option if the article is nominated, because if it got deleted, the attribution would be lost, violating the GFDL. Be proactive. If you do get in a deletion debate, do not get high and mighty quoting the deletion policy to people and how all deletionists are evil, biased POV pushers. If there's anything that will rack up the deletion votes, it's getting people to associate an uncivil contributor with the article. And finally: make decisions on individual articles, do not act as if you're writing policy. Wiki decisions set far less precedent than people like to believe, and precedent can always be overridden in special cases.

That settles that, for now. So now on to importance... On second thought, I think I've had more than my share of WikiPhilosophy for now. :-) JRM 18:13, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

A thought to consider

Presented for your consideration. Note that I don't claim this to be what I actually believe, not so much because I don't believe it as because I'm, uh, a little frigging tired of being insulted for ever suggesting that anything ever falls under the rubric of "fancruft" or that maybe those of us using the term "fancruft" are not evil bigots for doing so. Here is, however, a simple formulation:

Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.
The contents of fictions, whether those fictions are high culture or pop culture, are not themselves real-world, and therefore do not automatically deserve attention equal to real-world phenomena.
Fictions themselves, however, are real-world phenomena, and may deserve attention.
The attention and detail in which is appropriate to cover the contents of a fiction should be proportionate to the notability of the fiction itself as a real-world phenomena.

Discuss, or don't. -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:50, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You forgot to add "or else". :-)

Incidentally, you can demand civility here. If you're civil about it. Don't automatically take every challenge of your opinion as an insult, but don't allow people to lash out at you either.

Now, on to the discussion. It's not going to be much of a discussion, because we're simply of different opinions in the matter. That happens.

Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.

This is a charged statement; an opinion, and not a starting point. You explicate what this statement means below, but in itself we cannot deduce anything from it.

The contents of fictions, whether those fictions are high culture or pop culture, are not themselves real-world, and therefore do not automatically deserve attention equal to real-world phenomena.

You're right. But this does not establish that they automatically do not deserve equal attention. Or even attention enough to be in Wikipedia. This is merely your opinion. A respected opinion, but still an opinion.

The attention and detail in which is appropriate to cover the contents of a fiction should be proportionate to the notability of the fiction itself as a real-world phenomena.

Possibly. That's more properly taken as part of the discussion on importance, because it's not restricted to fiction. Some people believe this applies to any topic. Some people believe it applies to no topic and that notability is overrated. It's not specific to fancruft. Sorry, "fiction". JRM 19:17, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

On the whole, I agree with Antaeus' points. My thoughts:

Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.
Absolutely. It is possible that this is not explicitly stated in policy, because it is self-evident.
The contents of fictions, whether those fictions are high culture or pop culture, are not themselves real-world, and therefore do not automatically deserve attention equal to real-world phenomena.
Seems obvious.
Fictions themselves, however, are real-world phenomena, and may deserve attention.
Or they may not. However, given that the "moral majority" of Wikipedians leans towards inclusionism, you will usually find it hard to justify exclusion of any particular work of fiction.
The attention and detail in which is appropriate to cover the contents of a fiction should be proportionate to the notability of the fiction itself as a real-world phenomena.
Could not agree more. But that leaves the problem, whose real world are we talking about? The real world of the average slashdotter or videogamer is certainly not the same as that of an average encyclopedia reader, and that's the heart of our problem here. It makes me angry to see the biased views of our (technologically inclined and subculture-affiliated, to put it mildly) average editors dominate the overall direction of our content, but, sad and incomprehensible as it may be, all this anime-videogame-sci-fi-and-whatnot crap may be their real world after all, and that leaves us hardly any argument against inclusion. An unpleasant aspect of this is that, the more nerdy fancruft we get, the more nerds we may attract, and that possibility makes me serriously worry about our reputation in the real world. Kosebamse 21:46, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia is intended to be a real-world encyclopedia.

Absolutely. It is possible that this is not explicitly stated in policy, because it is self-evident.

Really? What is it, then? "Wikipedia is not a hoax library"? Sure. "Wikipedia is not a place for original research"? Obviously. "Wikipedia takes its topics from the real world"? Undoubtedly. "Wikipedia should reflect the biases, opinions and interests of the real world"? Certainly not. JRM 22:18, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

Kose, your outrage at our bias is understandable, and we do have things like Wikipedia:Bias. I think you're wrong when you conclude that having more nerd-inspired material will attract more nerds, though—as Wikipedia grows, we will also attract people from other fields. Concerns about our "reputation" are one thing, but only one thing. Does an encyclopedia need to define itself with concerns about how it looks like to the outside world? Are you aware how many people think we're off our rocker because we are free, and open for editing by all? Yet nobody of us would advocate abandoning that. Countering bias is not about appearing nice to the outside world; it's about intellectual honesty and completeness. (And raging at the "nerds" really isn't going to help much. They're not going to disappear because you vote to delete all their output, or something. :-) JRM 22:18, 2004 Dec 12 (UTC)

Countering bias is not about appearing nice to the outside world; it's about intellectual honesty and completeness. Methinks that our internal processes are good enough to handle bias in most cases, and intellectual honesty is certainly an important aspect. In an indirect way, however, the outside world plays a role: we always need more qualified editors to improve our content, and it's a bad idea to discourage them in any way (like presenting ourselves as the Internet's fancruft central). But I realize that there seems to be little empirical evidence to prove that crappy content harms our reputation or discourages potential editors, as obvious as this may be. Anyways, I'll stop shouting now and return to my real-world ivory tower. Real-world ivory tower, that looks like a nice metaphor for an ideal Wikipedia. Thanks fo your thoughts, and your patience. Kosebamse 07:49, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No, thanks for your input. I was actually far too snappy in my comeback—I guess that just shows I have some unresolved "issues" myself.

Too many people here just popped in to argue why fancruft is harmless/good and even why the word itself should be taboo. We also need people willing to argue that it's bad. However, after this whole discussion I'm convinced the whole fancruft debate is just an instance of much larger, general debates on quality standards in Wikipedia. I have a feeling that once we have settled those (if ever) the fancruft policies will follow more-or-less automatically. In particular, it may happen that some day the difference between "inclusionists" and "deletionists" (I use the terms loosely because they're convenient but labeling) may be at such odds that Wikipedia will fork, or a filter will be imposed (not the simple random link tag!) that establishes a quality threshold for the general public. In much the same way that it would allow us to vote on "approved" versions for public review, it might be that certain "fancruft" then gets no "approved" version at all, and disappears from the public radar, still available for "shadow" viewing and editing by those who want to. They could establish new filters and get the Encyclopedia Fancruftia (or the Wikimaginarium) just to their tastes. And there will always be hardcore editors who will only use the Encyclopedia Universalia, that has no filters at all (what we now call "Wikipedia"). As many have argued, filtering seems to be a better option than forking. Nobody wants to duplicate all that effort. With filtering, we could eventually eliminate VfD altogether, and just have a VfV (Votes for Versioning) with individual articles. Allowing everyone to create their own filters will alleviate a lot of the pain that comes with having "approved" versions (though there will still be heated debate, about the same as we now have for VfD, I'd wager. :-)

This is all pure speculation, however, and something for the very distant future. For now, we'll just have to make do with each other on all the articles. :-) JRM 09:23, 2004 Dec 13 (UTC)

Geogre's Thoughts on Lost and Found Information

Because this page is getting quite long, and Geogre and I have a positive propensity for loquaciousness (as evidenced by this sentence :-) I've moved this discussion to its own page: /Geogre's thoughts. (A vanity title, I know, but if you know something better... :-) JRM 00:07, 2004 Dec 14 (UTC)